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Dr. Mehak Burza

The Altering Landscapes: Mediation of Holocaust Memories through Art

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An event as horrific in its impact and magnitude as the Holocaust, called for proper documentation in the years that followed it. The most valued documentation developed in the form of literary responses that majorly comprised of the first-hand accounts and narratives of the Holocaust survivors. These were published in the weekly newspapers that circulated in the displaced persons’ camps. These not only served as a means to vent out their emotions but also as a way of re-connecting to their kin if they had survived. During the initial years after the catastrophe, the Holocaust historians, as well as survivors, have remained divided in their opinion with regard to the literary response to the Holocaust and consequently the genre of Holocaust literature. Moreover, there also existed the ethical dilemma of whether or not an event such as the Holocaust should be represented in any form or genre.

In the Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature published in 2002, the editors David Patterson, Alan L. Berger, and Sarita Cargas explore the literature that developed in response to the Holocaust. The fact that the seemingly contradicted term ‘Holocaust literature’ exists is because the “soul is there” (xiii). They state that the Holocaust literature holds a unique and distinguished place as it transcends the event of the death into a return to life, and in the process, the readers become a witness. They conclude,

The literary response to the Holocaust is a human being’s endeavor to restore to life a relationship to humanity that harbors the affirmation of life. It entails a movement of memory—for memory is its defining feature— by which a soul undertakes a movement of return (xiv).

In a more recent work, Literature of The Holocaust (2004) edited by Harold Bloom, the Holocaust historian, Alvin Rosenfeld, in his chapter, ‘The Problematics of Holocaust Literature’, acknowledging the significance of Holocaust literature discusses the ethical problematics of the unresolved query about the tension between ‘claims of silence’ and ‘claims of word’ (41). He approaches this question through the writings of Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi and expresses that although the writers mentioned the brutalities and horrors of the concentration camps, there existed a latent struggle to express the emotions clearly. He thus states that the Holocaust literature transcends beyond the scope of being classified as ‘topical literature’ (21), as it demands a certain amount of sensibility and responsibility on the reader’s part. Rosenfeld further opines that the Holocaust literature is a ‘chronicle of the human spirit’s most turbulent strivings with an immense historical and metaphysical weight’ (22). He also highlights the role of the reader, as it is only through the reader’s imagination and understanding of the text that inexplicable and unwritten horrors are rendered intelligible. The fact that Holocaust literature apart from the Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) is written in every European language, classifies it as an ‘international literature’ (25). In the words of David Patterson, Alan L. Berger, and Sarita Cargas,

Holocaust literature is a testimony to the absolute dearness of every human being. It teems with a sense of urgency which disturbs our comfort and complacency to put to us the question put to the first human being: Where are you? Thus it transforms death into life by transforming its reader into a witness (Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, xiv).

Artistic Representations of the Holocaust

A creative domain through which Holocaust memories can be mediated is visual art. The artists depicting the Holocaust in their paintings explore the maxim of pictures speaking a thousand words. One of the earliest artworks is by Morris Kestelman entitled Lama Sabachthani (Oh God, why have you forsaken me?) which depicts a group of Jewish people mourning over a pile of unburied corpses. The artist Edgar Ainsworth visited the Bergen Belsen concentration camp after liberation and recorded the scene in his drawing, Belsen: April 1945 in which he sketched various aspects of the camp. The best-known Holocaust artwork is Charlotte Salomon’s play Life? Or Theater? composed of seven hundred sixty-nine paintings. The artworks form a major part of exhibitions in the Holocaust museums particularly the Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. The Holocaust is also depicted in the artworks produced by artists born after 1945. The most well known example is of post Holocaust artwork is by Anselm Kiefer. His painting Margarethe (1981) is inspired by Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” and Goethe’s Faust and depicts the golden hair of Margarete in the form yellow straws. Another painting Sternenfall (Falling Stars) created in 1998 depicts a sky with celestial bodies that are numbered, alluding to the tattooed numbers, both of which are alphanumeric. The Auschwitz Album published in 1981 and Auschwitz: A History in Photographs published in 1993 remain the best-known photographic record books of the largest death camp of Auschwitz.

More recent works include artworks by Morris Kagan, a second-generation survivor who shares his father’s artwork on social media. His father, Henry Kagan was a woodcarver, a skill that helped him survive the concentration camps as he used to carve sculptors on the order of camp commanders. Caroline Slifkin, an artist as well as a Holocaust educator specialises in teaching about the Holocaust through Holocaust art. She has created a Holocaust Arts Project called “Fragments of Family” in 2016. The project is included in the curriculum of various schools in order to develop critical thinking and visual literacy. In her sessions, Caroline invites the students to discuss historical artwork and to create their own works in response. Students view the art as a form of documentation, witness, spiritual resistance, and as evidence from the victim’s perspective. Through the use of visual images, students are able to develop visual literacy to add to their skills of critical thinking in order to understand, recognize and evaluate arts as a means of expression. The students are thus able to investigate human behaviour, and come to appreciate that silence and indifference to suffering of others however unintentional can lead to events that allow for legalized discrimination, prejudice, hatred, and ultimately mass murder. Caroline believes that learning about the Holocaust can evoke powerful emotions and using the creative arts can help students to express their thoughts, ideas, and responses in an appropriate and creative way.

Image Courtesy: Caroline Slifkin

 

Image Courtesy: Caroline Slifkin

Daniela Mansur, the creative art director at Tributart and the author of Art Therapy Journal: Holocaust Without Words through a chronological artwork narrates a wordless story of the Holocaust.

Image Courtesy: Daniela Mansur
Image Courtesy: Daniela Mansur

Daniela offers a blended approach as she commemorates she not only pays tribute to the Holocaust victims and survivors through her art but also believes in telling the story of the Holocaust through her art in order to teach the future generations.

Conclusion

The artistic works of the Holocaust portray the intricate human reactions to exploitation, and to the annihilation of one’s life and culture. The artistic works created by survivors or victims as well as third-party witnesses depict a kaleidoscope of themes that are self-reflective and thus deepen our understanding of the Holocaust. The two forms that have dominated the literary corpus of the Holocaust literature are the memoirs and diaries written by survivors that are believed to be the most authentic accounts of the Holocaust experience. Apart from these, over the years other forms such as poetry, theatre, music, dance and storytelling have emerged. The memoirs and diaries together provided first hand accounts of the horrors of the catastrophe, thereby informing the readers what living during the Holocaust was. There is also a proliferation of Holocaust fiction, which propels the readers to imaginatively enter the realms of experiences of the narrator. The artistic works not only serve as a means of commemorating the Holocaust but are also a powerful medium for educators to teach about the Holocaust.

From Physical Shift to Psychic Shift: Anne’s Move From 37 Merwedeplein to 263 Prinsengracht

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Anne Frank Diary at Anne Frank Museum in Berlin. Photo Credit: Heather Cowper, licensed under Creative Commons.

Mediation of Holocaust Memory Through Diaries

Unlike the Holocaust memoirs that are written ex post facto with an intended audience in mind, the Holocaust diaries, considered as the most intimate and personalized form of literature, are written simultaneously along with the occurrence of historical events in real time. Instead of producing a refined memory of the experience, diaries present a raw memory of the reality of experience. Differentiating between Holocaust memoirs and diaries, Professor James Young in his article, “Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs” explains that while the former deals with an “analysis of history”, the latter is a record of a “movement of history” (410). As the diarists “wrote from within the whirlwind”, they can be considered to as “far more convincing of their factual veracity than more retrospective accounts” (414).

Unfortunately, as the adolescent diarists are neither in a position to challenge the notion nor to reflect on it later, hence their writings divulge a confused state of mind in which they are trapped. According to Dr. David Patterson, the Holocaust diarists write along the “edge of annihilation, between the collapse and recovery of life” (The Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, xvi). The Holocaust diaries are “a flight to the world from the anti-world, a flight to life from the kingdom of death” (xvi). Considering Holocaust diaries as a means of resistance, Dr. Patterson states, “The diarist who maintains an account of the ordeal does so in a realm where keeping such accounts is a capital crime” (xvi). Thus, the Holocaust diaries reveal an interrogation of God accompanied by an underlying theme of frustration, as the young adolescents are at a loss to reconcile the benevolence of God with the daily atrocities they witness and record in their diary.

The Psychic Shift/s

The Diary of a Young Girl is written by Annelies Marie Frank, a German-Dutch adolescent diarist, who chronicled her stay for two years and two months while hiding in the secret annexe within the building of 263 Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. Anne Frank’s diary remains the only existing Holocaust diary that is written in hiding till present. Unlike the ghetto diarists, Anne Frank does not have access to the outside world. Radio broadcasts and helpers of the Frank family are the only connecting links between the outside world and the secret annexe. Regarding her diary as her best friend, Anne confides in it her deepest thoughts and desires. Apart from chronicling the hearsay horrors of the Holocaust, Anne’s diary comprises of witty humour, intolerable tension, adolescent love aches and disillusionments, a growing awareness of sexuality and simultaneous snippets of fear, unrest and joy.

Anne’s adolescent effervescence is cut short, as the Frank family had to move into hiding. The trigger for it was Margot’s “call up” (19) notice that required her to report to the German authorities. As they start their packing, the first thing that Anne packs is her diary. She voices her thoughts and says, “memories mean more to me than dresses” (20). On 8 July 1942, members of the Frank family go into hiding. Their hiding place is located in the building of Otto Frank’s office. This physical shift from their house to the secret annexe in the office building of 263 Prinsengracht is also accompanied by a psychic shift that is apparent throughout Anne’s diary. Cut off from the rest of the world, the circumscribed world of the annexe is interrupted only by the visits of helpers who not only serve as the sources of information but also provide a relaxing respite for Anne. These helpers are the people employed in Otto Frank’s office and include, Mr. Kugler, Mr. Kleiman, Miep and Jan Gies and Mr. Voskuijl and her daughter Bep (Elizabeth Voskuijl), who worked as a typist. In order to familiarize herself with this sudden spatial shift, Anne describes the architecture of the annexe and along with her father unpacks their stuff and sets up the annexe. It is through her diary writing that Anne is able to confront the reality of their hiding.

Soon after, Anne begins to realize her drift from her mother and sister. She says:

I don’t fit in with them, and I’ve felt that clearly in the last few weeks. They’re so sentimental together, but I’d rather be sentimental on my own. They’re always saying how nice it is with the four of us, and that we get along so well, without giving a moment’s thought to the fact that I don’t feel that way (29).

Anne’s feeling of revulsion towards her mother and sister can be explained by secondary individuation process as described by Peter Blos.

The ‘secondary individuation’ process described by Peter Blos in turn is an expanded version of ‘separation- individuation’ process defined by Margaret Mahler. According to Mahler, there exists an incoherency between the physical and psychological development of an individual. She classifies the developmental process into three phases comprising of the normal autistic phase, the normal symbiotic phase and the phase of individuation-separation in which the psychological birth takes place and the child takes his first independent step. These developmental phases mark a transition from a dependent mother-child symbiotic interaction (separation) to the independent state of an individual (individuation) having a sense of self-awareness and identity that is achieved by the third year. These processes of separation and individuation though occur at a different time, are complimentary to each other. Peter Blos expanded on Mahler’s notions and suggested that this early process of separation-individuation acts as a precursor to a later adolescent process, which he termed the ‘secondary individuation’ process. According to Blos, the first ‘separation-individuation’ process helps to create a sense of existence, whereas the second ‘separation-individuation’ process helps to achieve a sense of identity. It is achieved through a psychic restructuring that is helpful in formation of an adolescent sense of self that has a considerable affect on the personality.

Anne detests it when her mother treats her “like a baby” and always finds herself having an “opposite view” than her mother (32). Anne is thus often at conflict with her mother and is unable to reconcile her feelings of love and animosity towards her. Anne reveals to her father that she loves him more than her mother. She further says:

I simply can’t stand Mother and I have to force myself not to snap at her all the time, and to stay calm, when I’d rather slap her across the face. I can imagine Mother dying but Daddy’s death seems inconceivable (51).

Anne’s search for an independent identity is further triggered when a dentist named Dr. Dussel (Fritz Pfeffer) joins the seven hiding members in the annexe. Dussel’s arrival marks a further invasion in Anne’s adolescent world. Prior to his arrival Anne shared a room with Margot. Now she was left with no option but to share her room with him, much to her chagrin. Anne finds him annoying as he “switches on the light at the crack of dawn to exercise for ten minutes” (78) and then begins dressing, which makes the chairs jiggle on which Anne sleeps. Anne continues to face a paucity of space in her room as Dussel refuses to let her use the study table. When she requests him to allow her to use it for two afternoons a week, he agrees but only after calling her “shamefully self-centred” (109). When she suffers from a bad flu, she highly disapproves of Dussel, who offers to examine her. She says, “the worst part was when Mr. Dussel decided to play doctor and lay his pomaded head on my bare chest to listen to sounds” (151). Anne and Dussel, though equally sharing the responsibility of hiding, have an unequal power in using the room space. Thus, in a way Dussel intrudes not only her physical space but her bodily space as well, leaving Anne with no choice but to limit her anger only to the secretive space of her diary.

Conclusion

The psychic shift/drift inevitably becomes an essential part of Anne’s adolescent identity formation. With a growing sense of maturity Anne considers to forgive her mother and sister and also have a fresh outlook towards the van Daan family. She wants to form her own ideals as an independent person. Upon retrospection, she finds the Anne of 1942 with the present Anne, she finds herself wiser and more real than her previous superficial version. Though she has no issues in being indifferent to her mother, but not being able to confide in her father, affects her the most. The adolescent Anne is forced to trust only herself. Thus, Anne’s diary by being both a passive observer and a preserver of her thoughts not only satisfies her need for an emotional dependency but also invariably satiates her need for an identity.

From Wounds to Graphics: The Representation of Holocaust Trauma in Art Spiegelman’s Maus

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by Mehak Burza

Photo by Majkl Velner on Unsplash

This article analyses the depiction of trauma in Art Spiegelman’s Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. Post First World War, the definition of trauma has undergone a significant change. While trauma theorists are still divided in their opinion about a proper medium of traumatic representation, the graphic novels of the Holocaust paved a new way of experimenting with the traumatic form. Interlacing the text with images and conveying the meaning through the architecture of the panels, Maus bears witness to the Holocaust in a unique way.

Ethics of Representation of Holocaust Trauma

The Nazi rule came to an end in 1945 with the liberation of the concentration and death camps. However, the cataclysmic event of the Holocaust continued to re-live through the traumatic memories of the survivors. For this reason, the repercussion of the event was even more horrific as the wounds of the trauma were slow to heal. The recounting of the first-hand information of the event, reconnecting with relatives, restitution of confiscated wealth and property, immigration, and rebuilding of fragmented lives characterized the aftermath paraphernalia of the Holocaust. Following the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, many survivors were forced to live in displaced persons camps, where they had to wait years before being able to emigrate to a new country.

The late 1940s saw a significant increase in the number of exiles, Prisoners Of War (POWs) and other dislodged populaces moving across Europe. In order to prosecute the perpetrators of the Holocaust and deal with the Nazi war criminals, the Allies conducted the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46, which revealed the Nazi’s horrendous crimes. The Nuremberg Trials were a series of thirteen trials held in Nuremberg, Germany. The litigants, which included Nazi Party authorities and senior military officials alongside German industrialists, legal advisors, and specialists were prosecuted on charges such as crimes against humanity. Increasing tension on the Allied forces to make a separate country for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would eventually prompt a mandate for the formation of the separate state of Israel in 1948.

The Holocaust thus remains a major touchstone for trauma, and any response to it inevitably elicits a traumatic response. Trauma has been regarded problematic in its representation. Trauma theorists are divided in their opinion with regard to the propriety of its definition and a medium of representation. It is considered as a state that is dominated by aporia and hence eludes a straitjacketed description and definition. The trajectory of the definition of trauma has indeed been a long one. Reports of the psychological and physiological damage inflicted upon Holocaust victims circulated within a few years after the end of the Second World War; however, it was not until the 1960s that an extensive body of literature began to appear on this subject, and a number of comparative studies were introduced. These findings documented a wide range of physical and psychic impairments suffered by Holocaust survivors. This included severe headaches, fears, anxieties, dependence and indecision, and various forms of social maladjustments. These symptoms were then interpreted as constituting a syndrome characteristic of individuals subjected to the peculiar trauma experienced by Holocaust victims.

Consequently, the notion of trauma has undergone significant change. What was earlier known to be a wound inflicted upon the ‘body’ came to be known as a wound inflicted upon the ‘psyche’. It is this psychic wound which becomes the pivotal force in driving the traumatic Holocaust testimonies. According to Judith Herman, such traumatic memories often lack verbal narrative and context and rather are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images. Thus, the traumatized people see intrusive images and have recurrent dreams and nightmares - a condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder. The disorder was known by at least a hundred names before its formal recognition, shell shock, combat fatigue, and soldier’s heart being the most common. As late as the 1980s, the term Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was given its formal recognition by the U.S. medical and scientific community, which is central as a concept within Trauma studies.

The paradox of trauma is that it cannot be represented - and yet it should be. Cathy Caruth, in her work, Unclaimed Experience, argues about psychological trauma being the state that is possessed by an image or event. Trauma warrants recognition, and hence testimony of trauma imports a moral obligation for others to bear witness to it and participate in its reconstruction. The narrative of trauma that is provided through testimony generates our knowledge of that trauma, which emerges from the void. With respect to traumatic memory and the reconstruction of events, Dominick La Capra goes beyond the notion of ‘belatedness’ viewed by trauma theorists such as Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman as being essential to trauma. Elaborating on the Freudian discourse of psychoanalysis, La Capra suggests the dual processes of ‘acting out’ and ‘working through’. While in the former, the victim relives the past as if it were fully present; the latter involves gaining a critical distance on the event in order to distinguish between the past and the present. This becomes necessary for the victim as having survived the catastrophe, the victim sees himself as a changed person. The haunting by a traumatic event, La Capra believes, can be countered by narrative, and over the decades post Second World War, there was an increase in the Holocaust memoirs written by the survivors describing the inhuman atrocities and their disquieting experiences.

When looking for representations of the Holocaust’s trauma, one finds numerous examples. On one hand, there are survivor testimonies with a chronological account of the traumatic memories, on the other, literary texts also exist that defy the chronology. One such example is the genre of graphic narratives that breathe life into texts through images. On the Western front, the nineteenth century was the time when the speech balloons evolved as a means of ascribing dialogue and William Hogarth established a set of narratives over a number of images. It was also the era of the mass enlargement of the press and the hitherto satirical drawings, which appeared as individual works of art, were superseded with the advent of lithography and woodblock etching. This paved the way for the regular appearance of caricatures in the newspapers and magazines, which gained the name cartoons around the middle of the nineteenth century Soon after, the sequences of drawings in the cartoons were assigned certain sections of narratives along with it, a form that emerged as comics. They consisted of interrelated panels displaying brief humor with text in speech balloons, with R.F. Outcault being the major driving force of the form. However, unlike the comics, the graphic narratives provide stand-alone stories with a more complex plot, delving into all sorts of social, political, and psychological issues. The first decisive usage of the term ‘graphic novel’ is attributed to Will Eisner, who coined it in his 1978 book entitled A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories.

Maus by Art Spiegelman not only illuminates vivid memories of the Holocaust but also attempts to analyze the trans-generational trauma of the second generation. Representing the second survivor generation, Art Spiegelman makes an effort to recover his father, Vladek’s tale. Maus is a two-volume graphic narrative (Maus I: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began) in which Art Spiegelman retells the tale of his father Vladek, a Polish Jew, who endured the Nazi death camps along with his better half and Art’s mother, Anja. Other than recounting an anecdote about the Holocaust totally in the funny cartoon/comic design, Maus’s most salient component is the animal metaphor. Spiegelman draws the characters as humanized creatures and Jews as depicted as mice (German: Maus), the Nazis as felines, the Poles as pigs, Americans as dogs, and the French as frogs.

There exists a dialectical relationship between the images and the text. At the heart of the story is the tortured relationship between Art and his father, an old man who is obsessed with his past, helpless, and totally impossible in his present, and thus can be seen existing in two different worlds: the present - today’s world of his retirement and the past- the world remembered for occupied Poland and extermination camps. The overall impression of both the volumes is in the form of a memoir, in which the author tells of his interviews with his father’s experiences in the concentration camps. As Vladek tells his story, annotations from the perspective of past speaker’s conscience in Art’s voice give way to those in Vladek, so the bulk of the narration is technically in flashbacks. The construction of meaning is done at multiple levels within multiple timeframes. The different temporal planes involving interplay of the past (Holocaust) and present are captured in unique ways, through the architecture of the panels, unlike the linear narration. Lettering plays a significant part in the organization of the graphic novel as it vibrantly represents and marks the voices of the various characters, and includes devices as diverse as spelling, bold, italics, and visual alliterations. Eisner argues that in a graphic narrative, the style of lettering and the emulation of accents are the clues enabling the reader to read it with the emotional nuances the storyteller intended.

A sample from Art Spiegelman’s “MetaMaus”

While the present conversation is shown in a white background, the past is revealed with a greyish background. Bold letters are used to emphasise a point. The different temporal planes of the Holocaust and the present coexist on the same page.

Pictures and sometimes, even words can be either black and white or colored. Both are important techniques and add different connotations to the story. Further, there exists temporal blurring in the narrative as the past narrative sequence is constantly punctured by Vladek’s present interruptions. This is depicted in several instances such as scolding his son for dropping ash on the carpet, returning the half-eaten cornflakes packet, losing count of his pills, and using the burning matchstick to light up another burner. Thus, Vladek does not make any efforts to redeem himself throughout the narrative.

Since Art has no direct experience of the Holocaust, the traumatic incidents are mediated to him through interviews with his father, which he records on tape. During these interviews, Vladek re-enacts his suppressed trauma as brought about by the loss of almost his entire family. Art, the secondary witness, receives the history of the Holocaust and re-interprets it by rewriting Vladek’s testimony in the form of a graphic book. In doing so, he acquires what can correspond to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-memory, and thus belongs to the hinge generation that receives broken refrains of trauma from the survivor/first generation. Through the interview, it becomes clear that Art had a brother Richieu, who perished in the death camp. His photograph was in his parents’ bedroom and it is evident from his father’s talk that he values Richieu more than him. Art thus becomes Richieu’s imperfect surrogate and calls him his ghost brother. Art’s traumatic competition with his brother reaches its ironic climax at the end of volume II, when his seriously ill and disoriented father confusing him with Richieu, asks him to stop recording his interview on the tape. Gabriele Schwab argues that the competition with a dead sibling is a classical syndrome of replacement children. It is also a prevalent form in which parental trauma is transmitted to the next generation and often to generations to come. Art’s ‘inheritance’ of his parents’ trauma results in his preoccupation with the Holocaust, although he is in constant denial with it. Vladek’s and Anja’s past experiences form an important part of his identity. His identification with his parents’ affliction becomes so intense that he starts imagining being in Auschwitz. He recalls his aberrant dreams from childhood about Nazi soldiers storming into his classroom and taking away all the Jewish pupils, and he fantasizes about Zyklon B coming out from the shower of their bathroom instead of water. His awareness that he did not live through the Holocaust contributes to his feelings of incompetence. Art’s trauma requires psychotherapy, and this can be seen in Volume II of the book when he consults his Czech psychiatrist, Dr. Pavel, who is also a survivor of Terezin and Auschwitz.

Conclusion

Although there does not exist a perfect way to represent trauma, as each representation has a veracity of its own, the graphic novels provide a new outlook to perceive the trauma of the Holocaust without traumatizing the readers. By approaching history through spatiality, the graphic novel provides an experimental way of representing the trauma, and in turn providing alternative ways of telling stories. In the narrative, the trauma of the Holocaust is also connected to the trauma of everyday events. An instance of the everyday trauma can be seen in the hitchhiker episode in Maus II. In one of his interviews, Spiegelman was asked about his choice of choosing mice to depict the Jews, to which he stated that he wanted to show the events and the memory of the Holocaust without showing them.

Mehak Burza is a doctoral research scholar of Holocaust Studies in the Department of English, Jamia University (New Delhi, India). Her thesis title is Literary Representations of The Holocaust; An Assessment. Her primary interests include Holocaust/Genocide Studies, Gender Studies, Holocaust Trauma and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). She has presented papers in international conferences in Texas and Gettysburg. Her creative works have been published in Trouvaille Review, Visual Verse and Galaxy International Multidisciplinary Research Journal. She also translates from Hindi/Urdu into English and her translations are published in Purple Ink Magazine, the online magazine of Brown University, Los Angeles. She is also associated with LLIDS Journal as a peer reviewer, as a copy editor (part time) in Journal of International Women’s Studies and is a moderator for The Digital and Computer Games in the discord server. Apart from academics she is trained classical dancer, with Kathak being her forte

Mehak is a External Representative at Strife.

At the Crossroads between Psychiatry and the Holocaust

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The Hall of Names in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Site in Jerusalem, Israel, remembering some of the 6 million Jews murdered during World War II. Source: iStockPhoto.

In the decades following the First World War, discontent, inflation, and political infighting characterised Germany. Adolf Hitler, who would become one of the most infamous dictators in history, rode on the subsequent wave of popular discontent, eventually becoming Germany’s Chancellor in 1933 and unleashing a radical transformation of the German state. Linking Jewish people to the country’s defeat in 1918, the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP) gave new impetus to this age-old racial thinking. To historian Tim Grady, for example, the NSDAP became the embodiment of German defeat in the Great War.

Among many of the ideals of the Nazi party, the Volksgemeinschaft (or the people’s community) figured centrally within the NSDAP. With the ambition to create a kind of social solidarity, Nazism attempted to put forward a cohesive and unifying movement for all Germans, at least those acceptable under its ideals. This pursuit led to the promotion of the concept of the Volk (the nation’s people) and its associated notions of blood and soil (Blut und Boden), where they would dwell. The Artamanen-Gesellschaft (Artaman League) started in 1923 as a German agrarian and völkisch (folk)-oriented movement devoted to a blood-and-soil–inspired ruralism, intent on carrying out the reformation of society (Lebensreform. The League turned out to be firmly connected to, and was ultimately absorbed by, the Nazi Party and the aforementioned concepts of the German Volk and their associated place of belonging in the world, central to Nazi propaganda.

Among the Germans belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft, the superior race and racial hygiene were the Aryans featured most prominently, as the epitome of superiority reflected by their racial hygiene. As a race that was believed to have given birth to all European civilisations, including the German, typical Aryan features included fair skin, a strong physique, blue eyes, and blond hair. This idea of Aryanism became the foundation of the Nazi race theory. By contrast, the Jews became identified as unwanted elements within this future society. As a people collectively to blame for the German defeat in the First World War, they became the victims of a German revanchist movement. Excluded from the Volksgemeinschaft, the Jewish people became suitable and convenient scapegoats to explain any misery of the German people, particularly the loss of the German state’s property (territorial and financial) caused by stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles.

One of the Nazi propaganda posters depicting Jews as demons as compared to the superior and ideal Aryan race. Source: The Forward

Emerging in this climate, the eugenics movement, pioneered by Francis Galton - a psychologist working on the hereditary nature of intelligence - in 1883, , held that only people with superior characteristic traits should be allowed by society to procreate further. Years later in 1905, Alfred Ploetz, a German biologist, published his work The Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak which debilitated clinical attention to the frail and undesirables. Ploetz termed this as the theory of racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene). As a particular special notion of eugenics, this philosophy led to the formation of the International Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene) by Alfred’s brother-in -law, Ernst Rüdin in 1907. Rüdin, a psychiatrist and an advocate of racial hygiene, through his research into genealogy, reasoned that frail mindedness and its related issues were heritable, and could be forestalled through eugenics.

The 1917 photoplay, “The Black Stork”, edited and re-released in 1927 as “Are You Fit to Marry” further established the benefits of proper racial hygiene. Influenced by the notions of racial cleanliness and anti-Semitism, Hitler acknowledged that eugenic practices were important to eliminate degenerate components from the country’s blood stream. Besides Jews as the Unerwünschte (unwanted elements), the other, non-Jewish groups included Roma Sinti groups, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the disabled, and homosexuals.

An anti-Semitic sign that translates, as “Jews are unwanted here”. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

The eugenic ideals were used to justify mass sterilisation on those persons the German state deemed unwanted. Moreover, in 1933, the sterilisation law was passed. Marriage laws followed, prohibiting union with the “ill suited”. A further measure that ensured the racial cleansing of the German nation was the enactment and adoption of The Nuremberg Laws on 15 September 1935. The Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, both passed in Nuremburg at the time ensured the exclusion of Jews from the Reich citizenship and further the Blood Protection Law forbade the marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans. In this way, a eugenic thinking process and the idea of blood unity began to seep in and spread through the institutions across Germany.

The eugenic ideal was actualised in October 1939, when the Nazi Regime implemented Aktion T4 or the T4 Euthanasia Program. The name was taken after Tiergartenstrasse 4, the street address of the program’s coordinating office in Berlin. The program included practically the whole German mental network. Headed by physicists, Dr. Karl Brandt and Phillip Bouhler, an administration was set up with an order to execute anybody considered a useless eater. On one hand, where the Nazi regime treated the Jewish people as parasites and vermin, the psychiatric vocation treated them as genetic aberrations. Killed from the outset by starvation and deadly injection, then later suffocation by poison gas. Doctors supervised gassings in chambers in the guise of showers, utilising deadly carbon monoxide gas obtained from physicists. So successful was this endeavour that the program directors set up gas chambers at six existing psychiatric extermination centers in Germany and Austria.

To curb the proliferation of what the Nazis perceived as abnormal, defective, and flawed individuals, the psychiatrists, who were fervent eugenicists, killed their patients who otherwise appeared to be quite normal without any deformities, much to the violation of the ethics of the Hippocratic oath. A majority of the doctors who became skilled in the techniques of this kind of extermination later also operated the concentration camps. However, as they realised that the carbon monoxide gas would not be successful for a large-scale mass extermination, they replaced it with Zyklon B. Used for fumigant purposes in the camp, it soon proved out to be an effective means for mass murder.

Conclusion

Commenting on psychiatric activities in Nazi regime, the German biologist, Benno Muller-Hill argues: “Almost no one stopped to think that something could be wrong with psychiatry […] The international scientific establishment reassured their German colleagues that it had indeed been the unpardonable misconduct of a few individuals, but it lay outside the scope of science.” As much as physical selection took place in the extermination camps the moment victims descended from the cattle trains, psychiatric selection played an important role within the hospital framework that preceded the Holocaust as it targeted those inmates of institutions who were thought fit for sterilisation and thus it was the psychiatrists who decided the reproductive potential of the individuals.

It remains thus important to infer that the intrinsic, fundamental standards of psychiatry were not just mirrored by Nazi extremism and racist bigotry, but they also envisioned, supported, and acted as an entering wedge into the Holocaust. Psychiatry, further helped establish the concept of the Volk as individuals within the body politic, advocating the expulsion of purportedly parasitic people from the country’s society. This subject of treating society to the detriment of the individual was vital to the corruption of medication and the defense of the annihilations. An underlying principle that was shared between both Holocaust and psychiatry was the concept of selection.

Mehak Burza is a doctoral research scholar of Holocaust Studies in the Department of English, Jamia University (New Delhi, India). Her thesis title is Literary Representations of The Holocaust; An Assessment. Her primary interests include Holocaust/Genocide Studies, Gender Studies, Holocaust Trauma and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). She has presented papers in international conferences in Texas and Gettysburg. Her creative works have been published in Trouvaille Review, Visual Verse and Galaxy International Multidisciplinary Research Journal. She also translates from Hindi/Urdu into English and her translations are published in Purple Ink Magazine, the online magazine of Brown University, Los Angeles. She is also associated with LLIDS Journal as a peer reviewer, CLRI journal as an editor for research papers and as a copy editor (part time) in Journal of International Women’s Studies. Apart from academics she is trained classical dancer, with Kathak being her forte.